Daimon’s creative blow.

The artistic and scientific images that we construct to represent reality conform to "representative codes" that for a long time have been considered as "natural". However around the beginning of the twentieth century people thought to have discovered that such codes are fundamentally ar-bitrary. This gave rise to an outpouring of representative revolutions in art, mu-sic, literature and even in physics and mathematics. But after that surge of crea-tivity in the domain of codes people realized that: 1) it exists a sort of "natural selection" of representative codes based on the co-evolution between human physiology and expressiveness of codes and on the compatibility and effective-ness of codes, to the effect that the codes that survived are stronger than those that went astray along the way (such co-evolution validates the systemic links be-tween us and the rest of nature). 2) not all representative codes have the same strength: some are more profound and some are more shallow. The former ones bring to mind the classic problem of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathemat-ics in the natural sciences, tackled among others by Eugene Wigner. This problem subdivides in other more specific questions: why some painters paint fractal im-ages although they ignore the mathematical structure of fractals? Why since an-cient times painters, architects and musicians have based their creations on the golden section?

Keywords: code(s), codes hierarchy, mathematical representation of nature, digi-tal philosophy, computer, literature and combinatorics.

Giuseppe O. Longo, Il soffio del dàimon. Variazioni sulla creatività in "EDUCAZIONE SENTIMENTALE" 36/2021, pp 22-48, DOI: 10.3280/EDS2021-036004